On an early summer morning near Hastings, Minnesota, sheep are having breakfast beneath a couple of acres of solar panels.

“I think they generally like the leafiest (plants)—vervain, monarda, hyssop—but they also really like goldenrod,” says Josie Trople, who, along with her husband, runs Cannon Valley Grazers. The company trucks sheep to land that needs grazing, including solar panel sites.

Trople says using sheep to control vegetation reduces the need for herbicides and mowing. They shear the sheep for wool and sell some lambs for meat. She says all the stakeholders benefit from solar grazing.

“There’s the landowners here, there’s the energy companies who are asset holders that are really excited to see all the different ways benefits can be stacked,” Trople says.

“You know, there’s companies like us, who are providing fiber, food, jobs, decarbonizing strategies, right? Because otherwise, these sites would be mowed, and there’s a lot more engine hours.”

Eight hundred miles away in Colorado, another herd of sheep jumps out of a trailer to graze another solar site, this one near a busy highway 50 miles north of Denver.

While their Minnesota cousins had a plant buffet, this herd is focused on one weed.

“Here they’re eating kochia, which is a native weed to Colorado, and they gain a lot of weight on it,” says Tom Brown, the fifth generation of his family to ranch in Weld County, in the northeast corner of the state.

Like Trople in Minnesota, Brown is in his late 20s. He says solar grazing helps him stay in agriculture.

“I mean, ag is not very lucrative to begin with, so it’s definitely helped have a future for us. I have kids that want to ranch and farm as well, and I think this is a great opportunity for them to grow up in it,” Brown says.

It’s also an opportunity for landowners like Eric Davis. This solar site is part of the farm he grew up on. Davis, who now lives in California, says leasing some acreage to solar is a better way to keep the family land in agriculture.

“We weren’t really making enough money from leasing the land to grow corn in order to do the improvements we want to do on the farm,” he says.

Davis plans to expand the solar installation and install drip irrigation to grow grasses and vegetables under the panels. In the middle, between the landowners and grazers, are companies like Pivot Energy.

They installed and maintain solar panels on about three and a half acres of Davis’ land. The site generates 600 kilowatts of electricity. Pivot Energy pays Davis a leasing fee and contracts with Brown to bring in sheep for grazing.

“It’s not just about the bottom line and cost-effectiveness, right?” says Angie Burke, Pivot Energy’s director of operations. “It’s about really being able to have a good impact in the communities where we operate and to support and grow farm operations like Tom’s.”

Burke says that by 2050, solar panels will cover over 10 million acres of land in the U.S., much of it currently used as farmland.

Distributed generation systems, which collect solar power and feed it back to the grid, have grown rapidly in recent years. However, this expansion brings potential community opposition, according to Joe Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab.

“We are seeing local opposition emerging on a widespread basis, we’re seeing that cited as a leading barrier to large-scale solar deployment by developers,” Rand says.

The Berkeley Lab surveyed about 1,000 U.S. residents living within three miles of a large solar site, which generates one megawatt or more of electricity, typically on at least five acres.

Overall, only 15% of those surveyed reported negative or very negative attitudes toward neighboring solar sites, but Rand says that number goes up for those living closer.

“Those within a quarter-mile tended to have more negative attitudes, whereas once you got outside a quarter-mile, there wasn’t a clear trend,” Rand says.

Agrivoltaics—farming, grazing, or beekeeping at solar sites—tends to improve public attitudes, but not by much.

“Preliminarily, we did see more positive attitudes generally around these agrivoltaic sites that incorporate, whether crop production or grazing or pollination, something like that. But the correlation wasn’t as strong as we thought,” Rand says.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, monitors the growth in agrivoltaics. Their data shows that solar grazing has almost tripled over the past five years, now covering about 50,000 acres.

Copyright 2024 KGNU.

This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.